If the best comedy is supposed to reveal uncomfortable truths, then Louis CK deserves the industry’s gold medal. Last week, the off-color comedian told Conan O’Brien about the problems with giving kids smartphones — and the segment has gone viral.

“I think these things are toxic, especially for kids. They don’t look at people when they talk to them, and they don’t build empathy.

“You know, kids are mean, and it’s ’cause they’re trying it out. They look at a kid and they go, ‘you’re fat,’ and then they see the kid’s face scrunch up and they go, ‘oh, that doesn’t feel good to make a person do that.’ But they got to start with doing the mean thing.

“But when they write ‘you’re fat,’ then they just go, ‘mmm, that was fun, I like that.’”

The fact that kids may be nastier when they don’t have to face their victims is not news. But it’s not cyberbullying that really gets the comedian, the father of two girls. It’s the way that technology distracts us from real emotions.

Louis CK describes how you used to get into your car and hear a sad song and get depressed. But now, as soon as you get that feeling, you can just start texting your friends. “You’re in your car, and you start going, ‘Oh no, here it comes. That I’m alone.’ It starts to visit on you. Just this sadness. Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it. That’s why we text and drive.”

Christine Rosen, who writes about technology for the New Atlantis, says, “It’s not often we get a comedian channeling Blaise Pascal.” But like the philosopher, Rosen notes, Louis CK is saying, “If we all exist in a state of perpetual distraction, we’ll never learn how to be alone.”

For that matter, we’ll never get to experience the joy that comes from being alone in the car as a great song comes on the radio and we belt it out as loud as we can. Wendy Mogel, author of “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee,” worries that the constant social interaction through technology “evens out our reactions in a way that doesn’t help us build up muscles for joy or anguish or what to do to sustain ourselves” when those extreme emotions come upon us.

You can never get too happy or sad, because there’s always another text message waiting for you.

Both Mogel and Rosen were impressed that Louis CK rightly put much of the blame for this tech-induced dysfunction on parents. Rosen notes: “He was pointing to an important dilemma of modern life: How can we expect our children to learn how to interact with others if they (and we) regularly give our smartphones more attention than we give the people right in front of us?”

Mogel, a practicing clinical psychologist, says she’s recently seen a pattern of older kids coming into their parents’ rooms in the middle of the night. When she thought about it, she realized, “This is the only time they can find their parents together, quiet, in a predictable spot and not looking at a screen, talking on the phone or racing about.”

According to Mogel, the kids tell their parents they’re “having a bad dream.” But, she says, the “bad dream is our lives,” with all of their chaos and distraction.

Neither Rosen nor Mogel is anti-technology. But they realize that the things we give our kids and the behavior we exhibit with technology have a deep effect.

So, do your kids need a smartphone? They’ll tell you they do, in case of emergency. But if that’s the reason, all they need is a granny phone — you know, the flip-phone with the big numbers that does nothing but make calls.

Of course, when you spring that on them, Mogel warns, “Your kid will say, ‘Do you really want to humiliate me?’ It’s their job to say that.’ ”